


barred and bolted

by sunflowerbright



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Humor, Romance, but noooo, did I mention the angst?, sorry - Freeform, was supposed to be light-hearted and fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:46:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Belle almost completely stops being homesick the day the Dark Castle explodes'</p>
            </blockquote>





	barred and bolted

 

She got homesick, of course she did. Restricting as it had been, sir Maurice’s court had been Belle’s home for all of her life _(all of her life up until now)_ , and one did not simply cast something like that away – not when she had, for all intents and purposes, been happy there.

It was at its worst the first night, right after he had closed the door to the dungeons and left her alone in there. The room itself had felt suffocating; high walls and little light and no way out. Belle hated it, and she hated _him_ , and she missed her father and her books and old room, and even _Gaston_ at this moment, would do anything, in fact, for another of his ignorable comments on her beauty or his proficiency with the sword. Anything to make the silence go away.

But she had chosen this, and she was… she is determined. And the dungeon was not as bad as all that: there was a little light, streaming in, rays of moonlight stumbling clumsily to reach her, and the cot on the floor was not as hard and worn as it looked, the blanket surprisingly thick: none if it seemed used, in fact, but then again, she supposed he actually had little use of the dungeon: he got what he wanted, or you died. No need to keep prisoners.  

No need to keep prisoners until her, it would seem. But to label herself as that seemed not quite in the spirit of holding her head high on this path she had chosen.

Still, that first night, she would remember shivering beneath the blankets, though it was not cold, whispering to herself lest the silence became too loud.

_(later she would spend years in a cell like this, and she would not remember this time, this dungeon, this prison, but everything around her would be an echo of a past she couldn’t reach, and she’d curl up on a cot again._

_she wouldn’t whisper to herself this time, because even that would be too much. In that cell, Belle would remain silent)_

She breaks one of his cups the very next day, and for a moment she thinks the worst, thoughts of flayed children still flickering horribly through her head, but then he says _‘it’s just a cup’_ , and she suppose he’s right. He can spin straw into gold, after all. He could buy a new tea-set, if he wanted. He could probably conjure one, no need for gold and a seller who haggled until he realized who he was haggling with. It didn’t mean anything.

Belle only spends that one night in the dungeon. The next day already, shortly after breaking the cup, he appears suddenly in front of her while she’s putting the tea-set back on its shelf, wisps of purple smoke picking at the edges of her dress, and it’s all she can do not to scream in fright at the sudden appearance. She clutches the tea-pot, afraid to drop it, not knowing what he will do if she smashes it completely.

He laughs and it sounds human. That is almost enough to make her really drop the tea-pot this time.

He abruptly stops again when he catches her smile, but Belle doesn’t feel like she can help it: he does not look angry at her humour, however, merely says that she will find her room – her real room - up the stairs and to the left, and then he’s off again, turning around and sashaying away again

The room is smaller than the one she had at home, but larger and more comfortable than she had expected. It’s… it’s nice. There are clothes in the wardrobe and a painting on the wall, some forest in a far-off land, soldiers marching on the edges, almost hidden behind the trees.

Belle dreams of home that night.

_(she’ll travel, later, and she’ll come to a forest like the one in the painting, and it will be surreal, to see that world with her own eyes for the first time. And she’ll feel suddenly homesick again, but not like now._

_Not like now at all)_

Belle almost completely stops being homesick the day the Dark Castle explodes.

It is a lovely day, sun streaming in through the window of her room, and she practically dances her way out to the garden to pick flowers; she has been here for weeks now, days bleeding into each other until she had become quite content with her duty and almost friendly with the man who doled them out to her. He is not cruel, she has found, not to her, and he likes to tease, maybe likes it too much, but he seemed to have gotten a certain apprehension of her after the second time he had tried sneaking up on her, and she had jumped around right in the second he came to and shouted _‘boh!’_

Belle had not ever expected to see the Dark One give her that look of shock and maybe even fright directed at her, and the surprise on his face had made her laugh uncontrollably, hands clasped over her mouth and feet running to get away before either of them could properly react to her improvised scheme of revenge.

That had been the same day she had found the garden: the same day the doors to the outsides of the castle had suddenly stopped being locked.

_(Belle is fairly certain that that is very significant, but she won’t approach him with it, won’t force him into admitting… whatever it is._

_She’ll come to hate locked doors, later. Locked cells and locked hospital-rooms and a lock on one man’s heart, the key thrown away)_

But on this day, she’s out in that garden again, delighting in the sunshine and the daisies and roses and tulips, and then there is a sudden shift in the air, and when she turns around, the castle is _gone._

“Oh,” Belle mutters, daisies and roses and tulips dropping from her suddenly slack grip. “Oh.”

And then,

“Well, that was rather unexpected.”

She steps closer, tentatively at first, reaching out a hand, because maybe it has merely been turned invisible, maybe there is a ward up, but no, there is nothing, merely empty space and a field of sand where walls and floors and ceilings used to be.

“Really?” she mutters, spinning around and trying to see anything, to locate the certain _idiotic Dark One_ who did this, trying to….

Well, trying to fix it.

“Hello?” Belle shouts into the open air, and feels like an idiot. “Are you there?”

“I mean, really?”

“What happened?”

“Did something go wrong?”

She steps away again, just to be careful, crushing the flowers under her boots and not even noticing.

“Helloo? Am I just going to have to wait here like some schmuck? Is this because I called you ‘too flashy’? Because you asked me about first impressions, and it could technically be taken as a compliment.”

“Is _anyone_ there?”

Still nothing.

The worry comes first, like it always does, a nagging sort of doubt. What if it’s all – what if he’s just gone? Is she supposed to leave – can she even leave? Surely there are borders in place, and magic, wild and ferocious like she has read in her books _(and seen, she has seen him do things that seems delightful and fantastical in their whimsy, but in the harsh light of day became frightening in their triviality and the ease with which they were done),_ and surely he would have… he would have said something?

But then the worry is replaced with anger – or almost replaced, there is still the insistent tugging near her heart, because _something is wrong_ – and Belle folds her arms over her chest and _glares_ , never-you-mind that she’s glaring at empty air, and if he is there somehow and laughing at her just because she can’t understand what has happened, then she is going to spill so much tea on those leather-pants of his, that he won’t even know what has hit him.

“You had better get back here right now!” she hisses. “Right now or I’ll leave, because making the castle explode was not part of the deal, Rumpelstiltskin!”

“I didn’t make it _explode_ now, did I?” the voice is right behind her, and Belle takes a lot of pleasure in the fact that she doesn’t jump in fright anymore, sudden appearance in unlikely places or not. She turns around to face him.

Someone had once commented to Sir Maurice that he should try summoning the Dark One in the night only, because the sunlight did the beast no favours and he abhorred it, like all evil abhors all good. And Belle wonders, then, at the beautiful garden around her; wonders why it’s there when its master apparently hates the sight of beauty so much.

“Make it come back again, or reverse whatever it is you did,” she demands, arms still crossed, jaw still set. “I’d like to sleep in my bed and not on some the ground tonight, thank-you very much.”

He giggles like he’s wont to do, and waves his hand, a gesture that looks like a dismissal, but she would have known, even without the heavy shadows suddenly falling over her from the building, that he had done as she asked.

“Thank-you,” she repeats, smiling at him and doing a courtesy, as much for the sake of it as anything. She walks past and collects new flowers that aren’t crushed, and later she’ll set them in a vase on the table and be annoyed that the sunlight couldn’t reach them inside the castle-walls, and she would determinedly start attacking the drapes.

_“What did you do, nail them down?”_

_“Well, yes?”_

She isn’t homesick anymore, not after that, not for the home she had grown up in. And later, much later, when it isn’t the castle but _them_ that has exploded, it won’t be homesickness that haunts her, it will be a dragon, curling around her heart and exhaling fumes and smokes, choking her from the inside, forcing the air out of her lungs and the blood out of her body.

And then, one day, she won’t remember anything at all, only that the door before her is locked, and it seems familiar.

All she’ll know is that the door is locked, and she doesn’t have the key.


End file.
